Corky scared me this morning. He found an article about multi-threaded unit testing [1] that introduced GroboUtils [2], an extension of JUnit, that seemed to already do what we are doing in Concutest-JUnit [3]. That’s one of the three legs of my project, and I would hate having to let it go because someone had already done exactly the same.
I have to admit that I missed GroboUtils in my exploration of existing material. Fortunately, after some examination, it turned out that GroboUtils really is more a way of running unit tests concurrently than a way to run concurrent unit tests. Unless I am doing something wrong, it does not install an exception handler, so it does not catch exceptions in auxiliary threads. Also, while it does seem to wait for all tests run concurrently to finish, it does not wait for all the threads that the tests spawned to finish, so there might still be a late failure.
I don’t think what we are doing in Concutest-JUnit is that special, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had already done it, but apparently we’re still the first who are doing it right and making it easy. Generally sad, but personally relieving.
